Real World Macro is a lively, thought-provoking supplement to introductory and intermediate macroeconomics textbooks. It asks the questions that some textbooks try to avoid: What's so great about growth? Is unemployment "natural"? Why should inequality matter? What are alternative propositions about how the economy operates and who it serves? What difference do such propositions make? What might actually constitute the best of all possible macroeconomic worlds?

Along with covering the basics—monetary and fiscal policy, productivity and investment, inflation and unemployment— the thoroughly updated and revised 29th edition of Real World Macro also looks at the financial crisis and its aftermath, the Great Recession and the current weak recovery, the connections between widening inequality and the macroeconomy, the deficit debate, the global trading system, and much more.

Organized to follow the outline of a standard economics text, each chapter leads off with a brief introduction, including study questions to help students relate the articles to the theories in standard textbooks. Seventy articles provide vivid, real-world illustrations of key economic concepts.

Real World Macro's well-researched, engaging articles are drawn from the pages of Dollars & Sense, the leading magazine of popular economics.

"The principles of economics books (yes, even mine) tend to be on the dull side and leave aspects of the economy and economics unchallenged. Real World Micro and Macro can spice up your course and lead students to ask the type of questions they should be asking." —David Colander, Middlebury College